Limbo
by Moksgmol
Summary: They can't live in this in-between, this limbo, forever. Booth gets some closure in the wake of a tragedy.


After she went missing it was months before he saw her again, and she was so completely changed that he didn't recognize her. None of them did at first.

They all had their suspicions but it was Zack who voiced it - 'it's Doctor Brennan' - and Angela who questioned it, Hodgins providing comfort at Zack's conformation.

Cam's face registered a shock she didn't feel, and she cursed the fact that she knew Zack was right, cursed his damn intelligence, cursed the evidence that had been pointing to and leading up to this moment.

Booth was frozen. He couldn't think, couldn't move, simply stared at her for hours. But he couldn't bring himself to touch her and so he had to leave both her and the Jeffersonian.

No answers were found, no matter how hard or late Zack, Cam and Hodgins worked. Angela couldn't help, couldn't look or even be in the same room.

But Booth was worse than any of them; he didn't say her name, didn't come near the place she was staying, didn't want to know the details. But he couldn't let her go, and so he found himself in limbo, waiting for something to happen.

But nothing did, and they eventually had to move on, so she was put reluctantly aside and they tried their best to let her go.

--

It was almost a year until he could face her again, and it was with the realization that he couldn't live in this in-between state forever. He needed some closure, some faith to believe in even if she never had.

So he found himself at the Jeffersonian for the first time in ages, ID card in hand, praying that it would still work after all this time.

It thankfully did, and he ghosted through the silent building, avoiding the forensic platform - her area, really; it always would be for him - and taking a set of stairs leading down into the ground.

He'd only been to this place a couple of times, but it had been burned into his brain once he'd found out she been put here, had haunted his thoughts and nightmares.

He arrived at the bottom of the steps, passed through another secure door, pausing in the dark a moment before reaching out, sliding his hand along the wall until he found the light switch.

He flicked it, holding his breath as light flooded the room, starting where he was standing and racing along the length of the cavernous space.

He started forward into the white, walking purposefully now, passing darkened shelves, ignoring numbered boxes and moving onto the alphabetized ones.

And then it wasn't long until he was there, at the box marked 'Brennan, T.,' and he found himself reaching out for it.

It was lighter than he expected - lighter than it should be - but he kept it securely in both arms as he left the room, leaving the lights on.

He carried her upstairs and into the foyer, flashing his badge at the lone security guard before carrying her outside. He made his way into the garden, the light breeze of early evening gently ruffling the trees and his hair. before he sat down on a bench by one of the prettier flower beds, setting her at his side.

As he lifted off the lid of the box he felt a flash of anger - it was a fucking paper box, not where she should be! - but a wave of sadness rolled back over him when he realized that she shouldn't be _in_ anything at all... nothing but his car or her lab or her home. He set the lid on his other side and reached into the box with both hands, pulling out what he'd been looking for, holding it in his lap.

And when his eyes settled on where her own should have been, he almost broke down.

After all, she was just bones now, and her empty eye sockets couldn't meet his gaze.

And so he just held her skull, the smaller fingers of his hands holding her lower jaw in place.

No, he corrected himself, her _mandible_.

And it was true - this wasn't the face of his Bones, it was just bones. Since she'd been found he had learned them all, every bone and all of its features, how to read them as best he could, but he'd never know them as intimately as she had.

But he did know that she had zygomatic arches, not cheeks; that she had a nasal spine and aperture and various other small bones, not a nose; that she had a cranium and mandible that made up a skull, not a head.

It was her teeth that caused him the most difficulty. Oh, he could name them - her incisors, canines, bicuspids and molars; he could talk about her dental arc and the y-five pattern and the total occlusion - but he had trouble looking at them because he had known them in life.

He had seen her teeth, white and clean and perfect, eating pie and smiling, and now they were there, just as white and clean, but out of place in a skull rather than a face, imperfect and loose in the familiar but foreign object in his hands.

He ran his thumbs back across the bones that made up her face, missing her soft feminine features. Her skull certainly had plenty - her negligible supra-orbital ridges, her single point mandible, her small mastoid process and almost non-existant external occipital protuberance - but her missed her perfect cheeks and soft forehead, her gentle chin and lower jaw.

And the pale bones under his hands were the wrong colour; he missed her warm, perfect skin. Her bones pointed towards a caucasian, but they couldn't express the perfect, soft shade of her face and hands and arms.

He lifted the cranium in his hands, pressing his forehead to her frontal bone, his nose bumping into the space her nose should be occupying, tears choosing this point to run down his cheeks and onto her bones.

After that he placed her back into the box, his movements almost hurried as he carried her back inside and placed her on the shelf.

A hand reached out to touch the box, 'You can't stay here in limbo forever - _we_ can't be in limbo forever. I-I love you, Brennan... I love you Bones.

And with one last brush of his fingers across the box he was gone.

_Hope you enjoyed it; thanks for reading it and thanks in advance for any reviews I may get._

_Ciao, Moksgmol_


End file.
